By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 27, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The timely decision by the Ghana Education Service (GES) to promptly clarify the imperative need for all students attending parochial or church-run schools to strictly adhere to the laid-down rules of these institutions must be commended. It is also hoped that all the stakeholders involved in this controversy, particularly the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), and the parents and guardians of the concerned students, would accord these standing rules and regulations the requisite respect (See "All Students Must Attend Morning Devotion - GES" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/27/15).

The foregoing reference here, of course, is to the Muslim students and some of their community leaders, as well as even a handful of irresponsible politicians, who have been agitating for non-Christian students admitted to these mission schools to be exempted from morning religious devotions and assemblies. Well, even as Mr. Charles Parker Allotey, Public Relations Officer of the GES, aptly and poignantly points out, any Muslim and/or non-Christian students attending any one of the country's reputable missionary school was not coerced to select any of these schools. Mr. Allotey is also apt to highlight the need for discipline to be upheld across the board in these schools, if they are to continue to function in the enviable way in which they have always been known to function.

Even more important to underscore is the fact that these Muslim or non-Christian students decided to attend these missionary schools because, like generations before them, they recognized some values or intellectual and even sociocultural needs that these Christian academies were known to better satisfy than their own Islamic-oriented schools or the bulk of the other non-denominational government-assisted schools could effectively and readily meet.

If the foregoing observation has validity, then it goes without saying that the least that the non-Christian attendees of these Christian missionary schools may legitimately be expected to do, by way of contribution, is to help maintain the high academic standards and great reputations long established by these Christian academies that attracted them to the same. And if they are too conservatively entrenched in their own Islamic religious ways as to find it too bothersome to adhere to established rules and regulations of these Christian academies, then, of course, nothing ought to prevent these dissident students from attending their own Muslim academies and/or any of the other government-sponsored academies of their choice.

To put matters to rest, once and for all, the Ghana Education Service may have to authorize the heads of our missionary schools to require any non-Christian students intending to attend their academies, as well as the parents and guardians of these prospectives students, to sign an undertaking that they intend to fully abide by all the rules and regulations of these institutions; and that if they breach any of these rules and precepts, disciplinary measures, including outright expulsion, would be exacted on them.

Our missionary school heads can enforce discipline in their academies by causing comprehensive articulations of these rules and regulations to be published on their websites, as well as making a limited run of hard copies of these rules and regulations available to the parents and guardians of all students enrolled in their academies.

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